Missing "The Future"

[Razade]

Where are the discoveries of principle like universal gravitation or Fermat's least-time or Dirichlet's principle? From what I can tell modern science is the accumulation of facts and suppositions as to why those facts are the way they are, be all that as complex an endeavour as it may. Can you direct me anywhere where a principle, akin to least-time, or principle of sufficient reason, or even the Pythagorean theorem has been discovered?

Why are these your benchmarks? New things are being discovered by the various fields of science daily. You're going to be disappointed when you throw out everything except your narrow field.

[2D8HP]

Where are the discoveries of principle like universal gravitation or Fermat's least-time or Dirichlet's principle?...

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"Discoveries of principle"????

I'd ask you to explain whatever it is you mean D, but unfortunate previous experience has taught me that much of the meaning of your posts will be forever opaque to me, but dude, you cited three ideas of three men (Dirichlet, Fermat, and Pythagoras) out of over 5,000 years of written human history, even if you cited a hundred, the odds are still weak that a generation will have whatever you mean by a "discovery of principle".

Regardless, while I'm still a little disappointed that space exploration hasn't progressed further, I'm amazed by the whole organ printing thing that I learned about from this thread.

Since this is in the "Media Discussions" sub forum, how about more suggestions for fiction with futuristic (instead of "alternate") settings?

[Donnadogsoth]

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"Discoveries of principle"????

I'd ask you to explain whatever it is you mean D, but unfortunate previous experience has taught me that much of the meaning of your posts will be forever opaque to me, but dude, you cited three ideas of three men (Dirichlet, Fermat, and Pythagoras) out of over 5,000 years of written human history, even if you cited a hundred, the odds are still weak that a generation will have whatever you mean by a "discovery of principle".

Regardless, while I'm still a little disappointed that space exploration hasn't progressed further, I'm amazed by the whole organ printing thing that I learned about from this thread.

Since this is in the "Media Discussions" sub forum, how about more suggestions for fiction with futuristic (instead of "alternate") settings?

You sell yourself short.

Has the potential for human potential to be expressed been equally apportioned across all time and space? Did the average individual in ancient China have much in the way of opportunity to become educated and think? What about a Paleolithic individual? Did they have any opportunities for thought and education? So, there is a progression of increase of potential, chiefly embodied in the history of the West, whereby individuals have increasingly had the opportunity to become educated and think, and so make discoveries of all sorts. And, so, we reach the scientific age and its many discoveries both of principle and invention. And, that was not random, that was not a result of dice throwing gods determining which times and places get the best opportunities to develop their minds, or else we would see at least a few scientific discoveries of principle in sub-Saharan Africa, after all this time. No, discovery depends on culture, which depend on the implementation of ideas reflecting how the human mind actually works.

I've already given examples of principle. Why should such discoveries be the province of a few scattered eggheads across the centuries? Why, if a man--or a youth--or a child--can rediscover such principles for himself, cannot such discoveries, and the increase of mental ability that they allow, be made on a wider scale? Why can we not educate people to make discoveries of principle, to think like Kepler thought, like Gauss thought--by inducing them to so discover, by enflaming their intellects with excitement for discovery? Add to that the increased population--how many people were alive in Kepler's day in Germany in 1600 AD, maybe 15 million? Why aren't there five Keplers in Germany now? Did we run out of principles to discover? Are we just stupider now? Or does the education system have something to do with it?

Comes down to how pessimistic one is about the human species. Are there really, as Aristotle said, born rulers and born slaves? Or, are all men potentially equal in their ability to make discoveries affecting the entire human species?

[Ronnoc]

Oh, we're discovering new things, new principles all the time. The reason they don't stand out is that, as is basic human nature, we've speciated the fields to the point where you're unlikely to have noticed the advancements unless you happen to be a student of that field. For example in my field of physics we've been making great strides in confirming the standard model but also in probing beyond it with things like experimental analysis of CPT violating processes, observation and the formulation of models to explain possible self interaction in dark matter etc.

[Eldan]

We find new principles all the time. BIology has probably produced dozens of entirely new subdisciplines in the last 50 years.

[Tvtyrant]

We all know science will be stagnant until we can prove whether Spinosaurus had a sail or a hump.

[deuterio12]

I've already given examples of principle. Why should such discoveries be the province of a few scattered eggheads across the centuries? Why, if a man--or a youth--or a child--can rediscover such principles for himself, cannot such discoveries, and the increase of mental ability that they allow, be made on a wider scale? Why can we not educate people to make discoveries of principle, to think like Kepler thought, like Gauss thought--by inducing them to so discover, by enflaming their intellects with excitement for discovery? Add to that the increased population--how many people were alive in Kepler's day in Germany in 1600 AD, maybe 15 million? Why aren't there five Keplers in Germany now? Did we run out of principles to discover? Are we just stupider now? Or does the education system have something to do with it?

Comes down to how pessimistic one is about the human species. Are there really, as Aristotle said, born rulers and born slaves? Or, are all men potentially equal in their ability to make discoveries affecting the entire human species?

It's more that some people end up idolized and most forgotten. Like Newton said, "If I see far, it's only because I'm standing on top of a pile of corpses giants".

There's always been plenty of people making important discoveries, that are then used by other people to make further advances. However we only learn about a few of those people because we simply don't have enough lifetime to review everybody who did something important, and who gets actually remembered is mostly a random process.

Plus sometimes it takes time for the true potential of some discoveries to come to light.

Dirichlet had trouble getting a better job offer than his starting position at a military academy.

Pythagoras was basically a minor cult leader back in his day, and Fermat a cult member back when mathematics was almost considered another form of mysticism.

For us nowadays their mathematics are extremely valuable, but back in their time they were treated more as curiosities and hobbies.

And although nowadays there's a lot more people there's also a lot more noise. But we still got computers and internet and smartphones and 2D materials and whatnot. Just pause a moment and look around you. In another 1000 years they'll probably say X was the inventor in the internet, when it was actually the combined work of many people who'll be forgotten over the centuries.

[Donnadogsoth]

Ronnoc, Eldan, deuterio12

Interesting. Could you name some principles that have been discovered in the past century?

[deuterio12]

Relativity, Incertainity Principle and a good chunk of Quantum mechanics?

[Excession]

Interesting. Could you name some principles that have been discovered in the past century?

Basically everything in Chaos Theory, if you want mathematics rather than science. Crichton put this stuff into Jurassic Park because it was new and fashionable. For a pithy quote:

Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

Also almost everything in computer science or stemming from it. Computational complexity, P=NP, data compression, encryption, randomness, entropy, etc.

Hell, Gödel's incompleteness theorems are only from 1931, and they're a huge deal for mathematics.

[Donnadogsoth]

Relativity, Incertainity Principle and a good chunk of Quantum mechanics?

Can you example any Quantum Mechanics principles? I don't know what "a good chunk" refers to exactly

[Donnadogsoth]

Basically everything in Chaos Theory, if you want mathematics rather than science. Crichton put this stuff into Jurassic Park because it was new and fashionable. For a pithy quote:


Also almost everything in computer science or stemming from it. Computational complexity, P=NP, data compression, encryption, randomness, entropy, etc.

Hell, Gödel's incompleteness theorems are only from 1931, and they're a huge deal for mathematics.

Hmm. Are there any other principles in Chaos Theory other than the quoted one? Could you tell me them?

[Ronnoc]

Can you example any Quantum Mechanics principles? I don't know what "a good chunk" refers to exactly

Bell's Theorem springs to mind. It precludes local hidden variables as a method of avoiding quantum mechanics.

[Excession]

Hmm. Are there any other principles in Chaos Theory other than the quoted one? Could you tell me them?

That line came straight from Wikipedia. I'm sure there are others, but mathematics isn't my field (and chaos theory really isn't) so I don't know it well enough to distil it down to a single line. You'll need to do your own research on that one. I used it as an example because Jurassic Park was on TV over the holidays.

Ask me about computer science principles and I can help more.

[tonberrian]

Hmm. Are there any other principles in Chaos Theory other than the quoted one? Could you tell me them?

This is an interesting question, when you refuse to define what, exactly, a principle is. How could we possibly give an example with any accuracy without knowing the target?

[Eldan]

Are you kidding? You have to be. The last 100 years of biology is... everything. Except evolution, maybe, and that was entirely overhauled several times.

I mean, you've never defined what you think a principle is, so I can't name you any, but:

Ecology:
Where even to start... the term ecosystem was only invented in the 30s.

The concept of ecological succession in the 1910s
The nitrogen, carbon, water cycles
Biocoenosis
Proper theories and mathematics of food chains
Lotka-Volterra equations (predator-prey system, the concept of unstable ecosystems)
Population ecology
The ecological niche
Group selection
Sociobiology
Game theory
Endosymbiosis
Neutral theory
Genetic drift
The punctuated equillibrium
Impact events and mass extinctions

Genetics, microbiology, biochemistry, biotechnology:
Chromosomes
The great synthesis
Bacteriophages
ATP and mitochondria
The theory that DNA carries genetic information
The structure of DNA
Semiconversative replication
The Genetic code
The discovery of RNA
Gene regulation
Clone selection theory
Krebs Cycle
Molecular dynamics
PCR
Sequencing
Recombinant techniques
Transgenics
Transfection
Splicing
Morphogenesis
Homeobox
Shotgun sequencing
Environmental genomics
Primary, secondary and tertiary protein structures

Neuroscience:
Action potentials
The mathematics of axons
Neurotransmission
Synapses
Neurosurgery
Plasticity
Electrode therapy
Antipsychotics and other psycho-pharmaka.

Plus:
All of bioinformatics, computational biology, genomics...

That's just off the top of my head, too, in fields I know a bit about.

[Narkis]

Can you example any Quantum Mechanics principles? I don't know what "a good chunk" refers to exactly

Science does not work that way. It is the process by which we, humans, attempt to observe, describe and explain reality. Sometimes that process results in descriptions that are rather easy to understand for a layperson, easy to summarise, and has catchy titles. Other times reality isn't so accomodating, and the description is more difficult to wrap one's head around. You put the former in a pedestal and call them "principles" while completely ignoring the latter. It's not an uncommon mistake, that's how science is taught in High Schools after all. In easy to digest bite-sized quotes, all completely separate from each other. But reality does not work that way. More often than not, those "principles" are nothing more than an old era's best guesses, now known to be incomplete. Newton's law of gravitation was one of your examples of a "principle", and it is in fact a perfect example: Catchy title, easy to understand and summarise, and wrong. It's a good approximation of reality as we know it, but Einstein's more accurate alternative is impossible for an average high-schooler to learn well. It's close enough not to be a problem for anyone who's not a professional in a related field, but it's laughable when you claim old geniuses remain unsurpassed, when they were, in fact surpassed close to a hundred years ago. And even those who surpassed them have in turn be surpassed by others, as science inevitably marches on.

Eldan has provided you with a list of advances in biology in the past century. I could write a similar one in physics, easily. Quantum mechanics, relativity, spacetime. These all did not even exist as concepts in the 19th century. But there's no point in an itemized list. None of thse fit in the box you have in your mind labeled "principles". And so I'm sure you're going to ignore them completely in favor of your preconceived notions of an idealized past, just like you've done before.

[Chen]

Interesting. Could you name some principles that have been discovered in the past century?

You could just go through the list of Nobel prizes in physics since 1917 to get a good chunk of principles that were discovered. Off the top of my head I know Einstein's Nobel prize for the photoelectric effect was somewhere around the 20s. Bohr's atomic model should have been around then too. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle along with quantum mechanics in general was throughout the 30s and 40s to start with and continue on into the present. A couple of years ago there was one having to do with gravitational wave observation.

[S@tanicoaldo]

It may be just me, but I think that apart from nebulae space is... Kind of boring, we went there hoping to find the face of god or something and instead we found a big empty space of nothing.

To me the deep sea sounds a lot more interesting and it's a lot less explored.

Besides we found out that we could create another plane of existence, another space a cyber space a now everyone knows how much fun this place is, until we got all meme and toxic but oh well.

[Donnadogsoth]

Science does not work that way. It is the process by which we, humans, attempt to observe, describe and explain reality. Sometimes that process results in descriptions that are rather easy to understand for a layperson, easy to summarise, and has catchy titles. Other times reality isn't so accomodating, and the description is more difficult to wrap one's head around. You put the former in a pedestal and call them "principles" while completely ignoring the latter. It's not an uncommon mistake, that's how science is taught in High Schools after all. In easy to digest bite-sized quotes, all completely separate from each other. But reality does not work that way. More often than not, those "principles" are nothing more than an old era's best guesses, now known to be incomplete. Newton's law of gravitation was one of your examples of a "principle", and it is in fact a perfect example: Catchy title, easy to understand and summarise, and wrong. It's a good approximation of reality as we know it, but Einstein's more accurate alternative is impossible for an average high-schooler to learn well. It's close enough not to be a problem for anyone who's not a professional in a related field, but it's laughable when you claim old geniuses remain unsurpassed, when they were, in fact surpassed close to a hundred years ago. And even those who surpassed them have in turn be surpassed by others, as science inevitably marches on.

Eldan has provided you with a list of advances in biology in the past century. I could write a similar one in physics, easily. Quantum mechanics, relativity, spacetime. These all did not even exist as concepts in the 19th century. But there's no point in an itemized list. None of thse fit in the box you have in your mind labeled "principles". And so I'm sure you're going to ignore them completely in favor of your preconceived notions of an idealized past, just like you've done before.

Did I mention Newton? I don't believe I did. I mentioned the Kepler who discovered universal gravitation. Has that discovery been surpassed? Only in the sense that there might be two interfering wave patterns, metaphorically speaking. The discovery of the second, such as relativity, augments and improves on the first, but it does not absolutely invalidate the first.

The simplest principle I know is the mathematical doubling of the square, featured in Plato's Meno dialogue. It's a kind of test, to distinguish between man and beast. Failing does not mean one is a beast, of course, but passing it absolutely qualifies one as a human being, because it requires the operation of a principle of creativity in order to make the "jump" from a rational magnitude to an irrational one.

There's no point in me illustrating this, the point is to do it yourself, presuming you haven't already been given the answer. So, that's my understanding of a principle: a thought-object or idea resulting from the working-through of an ontological paradox (such as the the problem of generating a second square double the area of a first square).

The result is, like Kepler's working-through of the paradoxes of observation of the activity of the Solar System, the effect of the action of binocular vision. One eye can see very well and yet still be "blind" to what is going on, hence the need for different perspectives in order to properly see the nature of what confronts oneself. Human creative mentation is "binocular" in this sense, able to discover solutions to paradox.

I'm not sure if all of the many "principles" cited in this thread are principles in this sense or are more like "rules of thumb" like the many variations of "Murphy's Law". I'm not sure as well whether a principle of sufficient reason, or the general welfare, or of hypothesis, are likewise principles, but they seem solid enough. Not much point in Science if we don't think there are reasons for things. Not much point in government if it's not serving the greater good. Etc.

More directly to the OP, though I fear he is no longer interested, here is an optimistic article on the prospects for Space exploration in 2018.

[Eldan]

You still haven't given us your definition of "Principle". Every discussion of science starts with a definition of terms.

[Excession]

I mentioned the Kepler who discovered universal gravitation. Has that discovery been surpassed?

The inability of Kepler's theory, and Newtonian Mechanics, to explain the orbit of mercury was an enduring mystery in astronomy. You need Einstien's Theory of General Relatively to do that, with it's model of gravity as warped space and time.

So yes, his discovery has been surpassed, if you want to use that word. To put it more precisely, his theory of orbital mechanics was found to be incomplete, and replaced by a better theory in General Relatively.

From another point of view, Kepler's laws remains perfect. They're maths, not science, and modelling reality is not a prerequisite for mathematics.

I'm not sure if all of the many "principles" cited in this thread are principles in this sense...

Perhaps if you can show your reasoning for dismissing everything people have suggested, we would understand better what you mean. I feel you aren't doing a good job of explaining yourself.

[Donnadogsoth]

The inability of Kepler's theory, and Newtonian Mechanics, to explain the orbit of mercury was an enduring mystery in astronomy. You need Einstien's Theory of General Relatively to do that, with it's model of gravity as warped space and time.

So yes, his discovery has been surpassed, if you want to use that word. To put it more precisely, his theory of orbital mechanics was found to be incomplete, and replaced by a better theory in General Relatively.

From another point of view, Kepler's laws remains perfect. They're maths, not science, and modelling reality is not a prerequisite for mathematics.


Perhaps if you can show your reasoning for dismissing everything people have suggested, we would understand better what you mean. I feel you aren't doing a good job of explaining yourself.

Which I didn't do. Don't put words in my mouth.

I've given the simplest principle I know and the metaphorical essence. Do you know of a better way to define principle than that, other than a banal "rule of nature" explanation?

[Anonymouswizard]

How about a 'explain what the word means in this context' definition? Like I normally saw when I participated in debates. We know a principle isn't a theory, but is the theory of Special Relativity a principle? If so why, of not why not? You're ignoring the second question entirely.

Or what that be too transparent for you, make it hard for you to Dodge when people ask for evidence?

[Excession]

Which I didn't do. Don't put words in my mouth.

If you don't want me to put words in your mouth, put some there yourself that I can understand. If you leave me to puzzle out what you mean, please don't blame me when when I get the wrong answer to that puzzle. It seems to me that your response to all of the examples you have been given is this:

I'm not sure if all of the many "principles" cited in this thread are principles in this sense or are more like "rules of thumb"

Was there nothing in there that meets your criteria?

Please, explain again what you mean. Without using jargon like "ontological paradox" (a Google search tells me it is something to do with time travel?) or strained metaphors about binocular vision. Why is Kepler's math more important or meaningful to you than relativity, uncertainty, P=NP, or pretty much everything in modern science apparently.

Edit: Lots of typos.

[Eldan]

An example is not a definition.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Which I didn't do. Don't put words in my mouth.

I've given the simplest principle I know and the metaphorical essence. Do you know of a better way to define principle than that, other than a banal "rule of nature" explanation?

But what is a banal rule of nature? I suppose E=mc^2 would be a principle, as would the rules of Mendelian genetics, and maybe a summary like "evolution is driven by mutation and selection", but anything that takes over three sentences to explain is not? Like say the standard (sub-atomic) particle model, or the mechanism of DNA->RNA->protein transcription and translation? Or does that still count, but does it stop where it's applied research, like how to clone a vertebrate, or how to genetically manipulate an embryo, or how to genetically modify a grown creature?

[Frozen_Feet]

An ontological paradox, outside the specific meaning in time travel theory (where it means a thing is the cause of its own existence, prompting the question of where it came from), is best understood to mean "something that seems impossible but obstinately exists anyway".

Working trough such a paradox is figuring out, chiefly mathematically as far as Donna seems to care, how and why that thing exists the way it does, and then codifying it.

Incompleteness theorems certainly qualify, as does the Turing machine and related concepts such as Decidability and Undecisidability. Universal constructors, cellular automatons and Conway's Game of Life ought to qualify too.

The weird part in Donna's argument is that they never seem to confirm any examples given as fitting their definition of principle. That's what gives the impression that they're dismissing them. Or alternatively, that they just don't know enough to evaluate the examples.

[Zendy]

To me Donnadogsoth is the worst kind of stupid. The stupid that thinks he's smart.

You all would do better just ignoring him.

[Anonymouswizard]

Back on topic, how has the 'modern' fictional future changed, and is there even an idea of the future? I think the most common trend in the new future is 'humans will be humans no matter what technology arrives'.